 This lecture is on the economics of the drug war, and which is an important topic in and of itself. But the real importance of this lecture is to get an idea about the differences between Austrian economics and mainstream economics. And this provides probably the best possible application to see those differences in action. So I'm going to explain the mainstream approach to the topic of prohibition and then the Austrian approach. And I think you're going to see stark differences between the two approaches. Now, the mainstream approach to drug prohibition is often called price theory. And so the mainstream focuses in pretty much solely on the topic of prices. The consumption of a good, whatever it happens to be, drugs or alcohol, causes some kind of externality on society, such as crime and disease, health, violence, and so forth. And so the mainstream approach is to suggest some kind of penalties along with enforcement to decrease the supply of this good and to increase its price. If you get a big increase in price, mainstream economists say, you'll get a big decrease in the quantity demanded. You might prevent new consumers from consuming the good. Eventually, the old consumers will die off and you'll solve the problem. So very simply, you take a market with supply and demand and a market price. You put prohibition in the marketplace, decreasing the supply, raising the price, and ultimately reducing the quantity consumed. This is pretty much how the prohibitionist view this argument as well. So while you very often hear of some free market non-Austrian economists like Milton Friedman and Gary Becker oppose the war on drugs, their analysis doesn't really differ from the prohibitionists themselves. The prohibitionists say consuming alcohol or consuming marijuana causes externalities on other people, non-consumers, as well as harming the consumers themselves. So if we enact some kind of policy which can be prohibition, it can be fines, it can be heavy punitive taxes, you'll get a decrease in supply, you'll get a much higher price, you'll get a reduction in consumption. So that's the mainstream view which is analytically similar to the people who advocate prohibition. Now from the Austrian point of view, of course, prices are important. However, we have to realize that with prohibition, it's not just the price that's changing. Everything changes with prohibition. Prices are actually relatively unimportant in black markets. So when we look at prohibitions causing black markets for particular products like marijuana and cocaine and alcohol, freon, what we see is that the production, the distribution, the consumption, all changes radically. Property rights, the legal system, advertising, competition are all radically changed as a result of this policy. So we're not, Austrians are not pro or con these goods in general. We could apply the same Austrian analysis to any good and we'd see similar results. For Austrians, the important question is, does the policy achieve its desired results versus what we'd otherwise expect in a market-based society? Now, we're not gonna be concerned with the typical libertarian concerns as far as this lecture goes. The idea that people should be able to consume whatever they want, the libertarians would argue. Libertarians argue that prohibition opens Pandora's box for the state to control everything. If the state can censor books, the state can do anything, including what we consume. Libertarians are concerned that government will grow in size and power and take away your liberties. We're not concerned with that issue for the moment. We also wanna be able to distinguish for the sake of the argument here today between rules and prohibitions. Prohibitions are state-enforced rules against consumption, production, and distribution. So we're not concerned with private sector rules that prohibit various actions. For example, you're not allowed to smoke cigarettes in the Mises Institute. If you go into the grocery store, if you don't have a shirt and you don't have shoes, you don't get served. Okay, so there's all sorts of rules that private property owners adopt that are not true prohibitions, even though they prohibit us from doing certain things. For example, many companies prevent employees from drinking alcohol or taking drugs on the job or as a condition of employment in general. Private sector rules are easily enforced and are generally obeyed. So we wanna make that distinction. We also wanna make some concessions and recognize that the consumption of certain goods like alcohol are indeed associated with health, social, economic, criminal, and political problems. However, even though we're gonna make that concession, we also have to realize that those problems are merely associations, not causations. Certain people are associated with all sorts of bad things. They do bad things. And other people are associated with the consumption of that good that are completely not associated with any kind of social problems. Okay, so now for the Austrian analysis. We begin by noting that a change in price is relatively unimportant and that with prohibition everything else changes in a black market. In other words, we destroy the marketplace and replace it with a black market. So prohibition is not just simply shifting the supply curve. It's not shifting the supply curve, Ceteris Paribus. It's changing the entire structure of the market and everything that we hold constant actually does change. We know that. So it's the exact opposite of Ceteris Paribus where we hold other things constant. In this scenario, everything else changes radically. For example, the black market is characterized as being unorganized, secretive, where there are no true property rights. And indeed violence is a substitute for property rights. Not only are the conditions of the market changed, but all of the conditions surrounding the production, distribution and consumption of the product changed as a result. So that what we see is that entrepreneurs start changing the characteristics of their products in order to enhance their profits. For example, when we see inflation in the market economy, one of the things we see entrepreneurs doing is adjusting their product at the margin so as to hide the inflation from their consumers to avoid sticker shock. So for example, coffee companies might reduce the size of their container by a couple of ounces so that they can keep the price the same. Serial makers may add inert material or more water or more air into their product so that the volume is the same and the weight is the same, but the amount of actual cereal in the box has been decreased in order to cover up for inflation. Most of the time, however, entrepreneurs are changing the characteristics of their product to make them more desirable. For example, cigarette companies put filters on their cigarettes, beer companies put stay tops and Coca-Cola companies put stay tops on the cans instead of the old pop tops. I don't know if any of you guys even remember the old pop top, but when you used to open a beer or soda, you'd pull the whole top off. That's how Jimmy Buffett blew out his flip flops on the pop top. So it's amazing, millions of college kids singing this song and they don't even know what a pop top is and why would possibly blow out a pair of flip flops? Well, let me tell you, this changeover occurred when I was in high school and I still have scars from one of the last remaining pop tops because if you step on one with bare feet, they cut right through your foot and leave a little smiley cut and scar on the bottom of your foot. And if it cuts into the right part of your foot, the bleeding never seems to stop. So entrepreneurs in the marketplace are constantly trying to do that kind of thing. They're constantly trying to add value without adding much cost. And of course, they have to avoid very costly features which would price their product out of the market. Like Apple would never make a gold-plated iPod. It would add like $500 to the price of the product, although it would be really cool to have a gold-plated iPod, I must admit. Okay, so what is the guiding features that tell these black market entrepreneurs how to proceed in this environment? Well, with prohibition, the key feature is the risk of capture and punishment. And every time they put more cops out into the street, every time they increase the penalties, they increase the risk. And therefore, risk aversion becomes the primary tactic of black market entrepreneurs. So what do they do in order to reduce their risk? Well, one of the things that they do is they resort to bribery and corruption. They organize themselves into an organized crime monopoly and they pay off the police. They pay off the politicians. They pay off the judges so that they can operate independently in the market. And they also rat on all of their competitors. So if somebody comes into the marketplace, they go to the cops and say, this new company is competing against them. They operating out of this house or this store, please go and arrest them. This makes the cops job not only is there more money involved in for them, but it also makes their job very easy because their victims or the people that they arrest are actually handed to them by the people who are giving them bribes. Another thing that they do is they change the product. Specifically, they increase the potency to try to decrease the size of their product. Now, when you first hear that, you think, how can you decrease the size of your product? You know, if you're an automobile manufacturer, it's not easy to decrease the size of a car or to decrease the size of a pair of blue jeans. But that's precisely what drug dealers and the rum runners of the alcohol period did. They would resort to more potent versions of the products that they sell. In the case of alcohol prohibition, they switched from beer and wine and into highly potent whiskeys, vodkas, rums and things of that nature. So this slide basically looks at the alcohol market from the late 19th century to the 1960s and shows the percentage of distilled spirits or whiskies as a percentage of the total alcohol sales. And you can see in this chart fairly clearly that alcohol prohibition begins here and the percentage of distilled spirits immediately goes up to 90% of the overall marketplace. Beer and wine are almost completely displaced as a result. And then prohibition is repealed at this point and the market basically for distilled spirits collapses back to its old normal level. So it's clear in history that these black marketeers resort to more condensed and more potent products. So a lot of the negative aspects of black market drugs and black market alcohol results from prohibition itself. And not only is alcohol becoming much stronger here, but it's also actually becoming more dangerous to consume because it's produced in a non-market fashion. So it has a lot of impurities, a lot of substitutes are used here. Wood alcohol, which is poisonous, was often added to the whisky in order to make it even more potent. And as a result, it's the effect of prohibition that actually made alcohol more dangerous and has actually made drugs in the war on drugs more dangerous to consume. For example, the potency of marijuana has increased about 1,000% in recent decades as a result of the war on drugs. And then we see more potent versions of drugs coming into the marketplace. So in the 1980s, during Ronald Reagan's war on drugs, they were able to reduce the supply of marijuana quite significantly. And what happened as a result? Cocaine started being imported on a massive scale from South America into America. And so they turned their attention to cocaine and then what happened? They started turning the cocaine into crack cocaine. And of course, they've been cracking down on crack as well. And so what we've seen is larger and larger imports of heroin and greater amounts of production of domestically of crystal meth, all of which are pushing us in the direction of more dangerous and more addictive drugs. So we started out with marijuana that was one-tenth the potency of what we have today. And over the last quarter of century, we've pushed the market, the black market for drugs into what otherwise are really crazy things to be consuming like heroin and crystal meth, meth and fetamines. The prohibitionists say that marijuana is a gateway drug and if we allowed marijuana to be consumed that people would progressively move towards things like heroin. The actual science, the actual economic science shows exactly why that's wrong. That it's prohibition and the ever increasing levels of penalties, of increasing the risk of capture and increasing the probability of being convicted by reducing judicial standards has resulted in the move towards much more dangerous drugs. Now we can see this very clearly in a controlled experiment. Now Austrians don't like to resort to controlled experiments but this is one that I think you can all fairly understand if you haven't seen it yourself. Especially if you go to university in the Southeastern Conference, where football is very important. And every fall across the street, 100,000 people gather for about seven weekends out of the year to see the Auburn football team play some opponent, most of whom are from the Southeastern Conference. So if you can imagine, it's hard to imagine because nobody's here right now, but if you can imagine opening these blinds and looking out and seeing within a mile's space, 120,000 people getting ready for an Auburn football game. It's gonna be fun. And they're tailgating, which comes from a time when people drove their pickup trucks to the game, put down the tailgate and sat on the back of their truck and drink beer before the football game. And that's kind of what you see, except now they're more likely to have many vans and million dollar RVs and all sorts of crazy vehicles. But they're still drinking beer. And if you go out there, probably 50% of the adults are drinking beer. And then it comes time for the game. And so they all march to the stadium, they give them the ticket, they get in the stadium and there's no beer. But they brought alcohol with them. They've snuck it into the game. What do you suppose they snuck into the game? Hard liquor. And it's usually the hard liquor of the double post-mortem drinking game. And it's usually the hard liquor of the double potency version, the 151. And so just that little magic thing, they go through the stadium gates and their beer drinkers and now all of a sudden they're drinking 151 and they leave the stadium and then back to their pickup truck and they start drinking beer again. So that's the controlled experiment. It happens every year, it happens every game. You can see it over and over and over again. The prohibition of alcohol in the stadium increases the potency of the products that they're dealing with. Now of course that alcohol is all produced in a free market, a heavily taxed free market. But it's still more potent. It's just not, the danger factor is not quite as bad. In prohibition there's no branding. You don't have particular brands of marijuana or cocaine or crack cocaine. They don't come with labels. Joe's crack cocaine. There's no product quality control from batch to batch from crop to crop. From day to day, month to month. You never know what you're getting. There's no advertising obviously. You can't put up a billboard and says, stop at apartment 6A, Eagles Nest Apartments. We've got ounces of marijuana on sale for 50% off. You can't do that. So there's very little information. There's no quality control. It's been mentioned earlier that advertising is not just a waste of money. It's a form of competition of improving products over time and reducing price. So in the black market we have all these problems that are solved in the marketplace that makes the products safer and makes the products improve over time. So the results are that black market drugs are more dangerous, more addictive. Plus you get more crime. You get more corruption. This is the homicide rate. The number of murders per 100,000 population in the US from 1910 to 1944, prohibition begins here. The average murder rate in the pre-prohibition period is about six murders per 100,000 persons per year. Then prohibition is enacted and the murder rate climbs from eight to almost 10 persons per 100,000 people per year. And then after prohibition is repealed, the murder rate declines back down to about five murders per 100,000 people per year. So the murder rate is very high as a result of prohibition because there are no property rights. There are no guaranteed sales territories. And so the dealers in this marketplace have to protect their turf using violent means. They have to use violent means in order to enforce contracts. So if payments are not made on time or if people don't pay for shipments and so forth, then the result is violence. And very often a lot of these murders are not people who are directly involved in black markets but are merely innocent bystanders during the shootouts. So if we look at all the people in black markets, what we find is, is that everyone is worse off. So the Austrian's view is very restrictive. It's not a cost-benefit analysis that we apply against the drug war. Mainstream economists would just say, what are the costs and what are the benefits? And so a lot of people like Milton Friedman and Gary Becker just look at the stats and say, well, it looks like the costs outweigh the benefits. And the next person who comes along, a prohibitionist maybe says, well, I think the benefits outweigh the cost. And Milton Friedman says, well, wait a second. We're not, we're really not controlling this marketplace. People are still getting a lot of drugs. Very few people are prevented from getting these drugs. And the costs are really high. And the person talking to Milton Friedman or Gary Becker says, I don't care about those outrageously high costs. I just want to save a few children from being involved in this marketplace. So I place a very high value on saving a small number of children. And I don't care if the government has to spend zillions of dollars as a result, but let's look at what really is happening here. Okay, those who continue to consume the product in this marketplace, okay, this group right here that continues to consume, they're worse off, they're paying more and getting a less valuable product. Responsible consumers who quit don't represent a benefit. So say, for example, you've got a person who has a glass of wine with dinner every night, never gets drunk, doesn't have a problem with alcohol, is not using any kind of machines or driving a car after work. A person like that in the face of prohibition who gives up his glass of wine, there's no benefit from that. There's no externality that we've wiped out. Beneficial consumers are worse off as a result of this prohibition. Say for example, people who are taking marijuana for some medical reason, they might have cancer, they might have pain, they might have trouble eating, they may have glaucoma, there's a variety of things that marijuana is used effectively to treat. If people like that give up consumption as a result of prohibition, they're clearly worse off. If we look at the people who create externalities as a result of drinking or snorting coke or something like that, the people who are addicts and who harm other people, if those people respond to the prohibition by consuming substitutes, legal substitutes, they're probably worse off. So if you were a marijuana smoker and they made marijuana illegal, and so instead you switch to drinking alcohol and taking oxycontin, which are perfectly legal, you're worse off as a result of that. And you're more likely to be causing harm to others. So all of the consumer groups that we look at, the people who don't cause harm, the people who do cause harm, all of their reactions to prohibition do not create any social benefits. We know with certainty that prohibition does not eliminate access to the good. So that virtually any one of those groups that I went through could continue to consume the product. I mean, you can buy drugs in federal prisons. You can buy drugs fairly freely in front of the Drug Enforcement Administration building in Washington, D.C. So there's little evidence that they actually eliminate the production, distribution and consumption of the good. We do know that prohibition actually attracts risk takers. So that if society prohibits a good, then risk takers are likely to be attracted to the consumption to be able to obtain that good and to consume it. The risk-seeking group consists primarily of young adult males who apparently have a embedded pension for finding, discovering and enacting whatever the craziest thing to do in the world happens to be at the moment. So is there any benefit from prohibition associated with the promises of the prohibitionists themselves? The Austrians say no. Things, there are no benefits at all and things are actually much worse and being made worse over time. So there is no cost-benefit calculation necessary here. There simply are no benefits to be offset by the cost. This is only a policy that imposes costs on everyone in society whether or not you are the least bit involved in the old legal market or the new black market. Plus, there's a loss of liberty, there's a loss of privacy. The legal system in our context loses a great deal of efficiency because of the number of drug cases that they have to deal with. There's a loss in respect for the law and there's a major increase in property crime. There's a major increase in political corruption and this does not stop at the US border but indeed crosses the border and corrupts other countries like Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia. And now it's all the smaller Central American countries. And add to that we lose the legitimate uses of these goods. So heroin for example is a great drug that can be used to alleviate the pain and suffering of people with intense chronic pain. But any doctor who prescribes something like that, heroin would be, his license to practice would be taken away and they probably would be prosecuted. And that's why so many people have ended up on OxyCotin because that's what doctors are left with, an inferior substitute which is now responsible for more overdose deaths than any illegal drug. Prohibition also, the unfortunate adverse effects of prohibition are also increased by the government safety net. So even if we legalized drugs, even if they were made less potent and more safe, there would still be a problem with drug abuse as the result, there would still be a significant problem with drug abuse as a result of the government safety net which increases irresponsibility in general. Things like unemployment insurance, disability insurance, welfare, mandated healthcare and so on. It's a lot easier to be a stupid drug addict in a society that has those, that social safety net. And there are also things to consider with respect to if we could eliminate that government safety net, there are a lot of institutions within the market economy that can address the remaining problems of drug abuse. For example, employment rather than having unemployment insurance, employment would act as a way of reducing drug abuse. If you want higher wages, if you want raises and you want promotions, you don't wanna be a drug addict. Employment contracts in terms of the contracts can also restrict drug abuse. Other things like insurance ratings, the legal system in general and the private rules that I mentioned at the beginning of the class of the lecture would also act as a way of trimming back the problems of drug abuse. So the upshot of the Austrian analysis is that the market economy is a much better way of dealing with the problems of drug abuse than is prohibition. Prohibition doesn't do anything to address the externalities of alcohol and drug abuse. It only makes things worse. It only contributes higher potency products, more dangerous products, more violence, more crime, more corruption. And so there is no cost benefit here. It's nothing but a loss. And so whereas the mainstream economists, including the Chicago school, argue in precisely the same way as the prohibitionist based on their price theory, Austrian economists by using a more holistic form of economic analysis find that prohibition is irrational. Okay, I'll stop there and maybe we can have some questions possibly. Yes, sir. The exam is in three parts. It starts in Afghanistan, in the firing of drugs, and then it goes on to the life of a dealer in New York and explains for a slightly more inclined to be a greater risk taker than Scotland in the Red Light District, I think we're taking it in nightclubs today. It's quite average because it talks about one guy who got drunk in Marlboro or somewhere where his friend's drinking, lost the use of his legs and started getting on drugs. Because of the prohibition, he turns an alloy clean about all kinds of things that were legal but could get high and he eventually died. And there are people in clubs who are taking further either just to get a quick kick but it's so difficult to, it's like I just wouldn't know if you'd seen it. If you've seen that documentary, if you haven't, I'd recommend you watch it, it's a fantastic piece. I have not seen that particular series. It's called Palo Trug School or Palo Trug School. Okay, I will say that just a general point is I think that people are today more aware that prohibition and the war on drugs is not truly a public-spirited project, that there are all sorts of evils associated with it. And that's important I think for ultimately undermining it is it's true ethical and moral character, which to me is non-existent. I think it's just an evil from top to bottom basically. And this idea where you can try to prohibit something and constantly add new penalties and new controls to try to deal with the problem, I think basically is a basic misunderstanding of human nature and the entrepreneurial spirit, however crazed under the circumstances. But if you take a drug addict and without giving them any help and you just take away the drugs, they're gonna find some way around it. One of the latest manifestations of this problem in the United States, where alcohol is now prohibited to young adults and has been for a couple decades and there are greater restrictions on other things is that there's a new popularity for the hand sanitizer martini where people take the prel hand sanitizer, which you usually use on your hands, so they're just shooting into their mouth because it's like 62.5%, which is 125 proof. And of course they've come up with ways of taking out the soapy taste and things of that nature. But the prohibitionist looks at that and says, well, we can't have hand sanitizers or we can't have... Yeah, so they'll take that away. They don't realize that there are thousands of things that I know about that can get you high. I mean, there's books on all this stuff. There's books on all this stuff. I've got a... Sir. Oh yeah, the production of black market drugs is very dangerous, whether it's alcohol or crystal meth, processing cocaine, processing crack cocaine, that's how Richard Pryor blew off his face by trying to make his own crack cocaine. So there's all sorts of negative externalities thrown off on the general public. Your legal system isn't efficient because the prisons are full, the courts are backed up, the judges are being bought off, the police are looking for drug dealers rather than real criminals. So there's a whole misdirection and set of externalities in the legal system. In terms of the production, it is much more dangerous. There was an episode of The Simpsons called Homer versus the 18th Amendment and they passed a prohibition. Well, they actually found a alcohol prohibition on the books in Springfield. And so they shut down Moe's bar and they shut down the brewery and Homer Simpson jumps into the fray, recovers the beer that was destroyed. He sells all that, makes a bunch of money and then he starts making bathtub gin in his house. And he's got like 40 bathtubs, actual bathtubs in his basement and he's making all this stuff in his basement. And then one night while they were asleep, the stills start exploding and Marge wakes up and he goes, sorry, honey. And then more explosions come up and eventually Homer's set on fire and their house almost is destroyed as a result. But that's all based on reality. I mean, black market stills were very dangerous, still are very dangerous. They're much more likely to explode and cause injury than if you looked at the stills at the Jack Daniels distillery. So there's all kinds of negative externalities. There's losses of jobs that used to exist. Like during alcohol prohibition, there were a lot of jobs making beer, making wine, making whiskey, making bottles, making cans, making kegs that are lost. And so those adversely affect real people. So in a sense, the total burden that the prohibition imposes on society, a lot of that is on people that are completely uninvolved with either the free market or the black market for that product. Well, I think that the black market is... Why is it different at whole rate? I think that the black market is what actually gets the drugs into the hands of kids more readily. For example, if you're underage and you're delivering loads of marijuana or crack or whatever to somebody and they arrest you, the penalties on a 13-year-old kid are much less than on a 22-year-old person. So it attracts young people to the black market on both the supply and demand side. Now, basically my view is that there are adults and then there are minors. And minors are everybody under 16 of years of age or everybody under 18, whatever it happens to be in your society. And you can't make legally binding contracts with minors. And if you make a contract with a minor where there are inherent dangers involved and damages occur that adversely affect the minor, you can be sued. And so it's very unlikely that people would be dealing with minors selling them dangerous drugs and putting themselves at risk either through their reputation effect of the corporations or through tort cases where you're brought to trial and you're found guilty and damages are assessed. And in those cases, if you give dangerous drugs to children and they're harmed and you're found guilty, you're gonna pay a lot of money and you're gonna be ostracized by society. So I think basically it's okay for parents to give kids alcohol in supervised fashion. And at some age, the kids should be able to buy these products like alcohol and tobacco, but that's a strictly legal issue, not an economic issue as to where that cutoff occurs. But I think the free society in other words does protect children better than a prohibition does. That is definitely my opinion. When I was young, police officers did not do any of this stuff, they did not have these powers, they did not carry the armament that they carry nowadays. They walked around and checked to make sure people's doors were locked and to make sure people weren't loitering on other people's property. And that's all changed now. They have much more legal latitude as to what they do and you have far fewer rights from the perspective of the police. And so basically I think that the disrespect for law and order, which is spreading, there's no doubt about that. It's definitely spreading in the United States, particularly amongst the young. It's because of the environment in which the police operate where their main goal is to make drug busts and to acquire other people's property and to sell that to enhance their budgets. And the fact that they don't really have to treat you as fully as a citizen anymore, I think you see a lot of disrespect for citizens on the part of police. And not only is it occurring more often, but because of cameras that we all carry around with us now we're getting more pictures and more video of police abusing their power and authority. There was just a case last week here in Alabama where the police raided somebody's house. They weren't even there. That people did have a small amount of drugs and they did have paraphernalia. Of course, if you have drugs, you have paraphernalia. And they shot the guy's dog. They killed the guy's dog for no reason. Yeah. Well, their budgets would be lower and their mandate would be smaller. And it would not only be smaller police forces, but because their attention would be redirected back towards crimes against property and crimes against individuals rather than these transactions where no one is harmed, where it's very difficult to identify people who don't wanna be identified. Whereas real crime, if somebody steals my car or robs my house, I'm out to get them too. Someone kills my grandmother, I'm gonna be out to get them. I'm gonna cooperate with the police. I'm gonna give them all the evidence that I can possibly give them. But if I'm buying some pot for somebody else, I'm not gonna help the police in that sort of thing. So police forces budgets would be smaller, their mandates would be smaller. And the best thing about it is that they would redirect their attention towards real crime. The harder it starts, but one of the main points that they use for marijuana legalization, which I found so persuasive, is that it's not just a question of this drug that, you know, all of us escape, but they combine it with legalization of ham. And so they show how ham combination of the greatest, taper of the best, lubricant of the best, this and that, and so Hamthwood's, the big winners of the colonial madrigals, the big winners of the world where it's allowed and it's a fantastic product. And so they combine these two arguments, the argument for marijuana legalization, just absolutely cool. Yeah, it's- We're denying this entire, hugely productive product. Yeah, hemp is a very important product that's been made illegal virtually the world around. You can get hemp products nowadays, but it's very restricted. And we can't grow it here in the United States and the nice thing about it is that it doesn't require any pesticides, herbicides or fertilizer. Yeah, I gave a lecture, the economics club many, many, many years ago, wanted to lecture on the benefits of legalizing marijuana. And so I talked about some of the traditional uses of marijuana and, you know, for eons it had been used to make sales and rope and paper and things of that nature. And so I gave specific examples from history that Christopher Columbus and his crew consumed over four tons of hemp on their travels to the new world. And people started laughing and I was like, what? And I said, you know, and when Thomas Jefferson was writing the Declaration of Independence, he was in effect using over 20 pounds of marijuana. And again, people are starting to laugh. And it was only after the third example that I realized what I was talking about. Yes, ma'am. Have you? No, I haven't. This is a first legal supervised safe injection site. So it's an initiative of the British Columbia government to create a harm reduction. And the idea- For heroin? Pardon? For heroin? For all different kinds of drugs, so they say they don't provide any drugs. It's just reduction, but they prevented like there were, I was reading there were all hundreds of overdoses without fatalities. And there was an exemption created for this pilot project in Canada for the British Columbia government to implement this in self-care. And the Supreme Court ruled, yeah, you can do that. What I'm wondering is, do initiatives like that tend to, are they leading us in the right direction, particularly in the Canadian example, or to more socialized welfare state health care models? Can this sort of inside safe injection site, if it operates well, then the case be made that it eventually be privatized. And we have private safe injection sites within the provinces which are striving to implement more private models of care. So yeah, do you see something like safety safety sites as increasing and in response to a giant socialist health care scheme, or as actually having potential? Well, there are a lot of problems with that kind of idea. Because it's not a true legalization, it's a very limited form of legalization. All sorts of problems can creep up. And I deal with this, an article that I published on misis.org, it's called Needle Park. And that's not from the Canadian example, but it's from an example in Europe. And so the prohibitionist side will often use, incorrectly I might add, they'll often use the results of these kind of initiatives as a way of cracking down more strongly with the use of prohibition. Yes, sir. Prohibition is a supplement to the arm of the opinion that kids go through a lot of government schools to get qualifications that are work-bound, they can't go to the employment level. The only option is to use the terms of welfare or to do something that's less reputable, but it makes a quick buck. I think, do you think that that's a saying on you? Yes, I mean, I think that drug abuse is the result of the environment which you find yourself in, where you find yourself being hopeless, where you find yourself not having the control over your own destiny and not having opportunities to be able to exploit. And I think what the government has done, increasingly over time, is to take away our opportunities, to take away the latitude of choice that we might endeavor and it's destroyed the potential to, not completely obviously, but it's restricted our potential to use our initiative to achieve goals and without being taxed and regulated to death in the process. So what government has been doing in general to us, taking away our rights and our responsibilities, taking away our initiative, in a sense, is leading more and more people to be leading unproductive lives, to seek disability payments and handouts of one sort or another. Going to graduate school forever. I think people just find themselves trapped and then some doctor puts them on three kinds of antidepressants and you get lost. You get lost and drugs is the escape. Well, I mean, like in California, they've turned marijuana possession into a $100 fine. That's the way to prevent that is, if you still wanna keep things in the black market, you still wanna have a penalty and you can't afford prisons, California can't afford the prisons that they've already got, you just substitute a fine and you make everybody a little bit better as a result and you don't send them into prison because prison is graduate school for how to do more crimes, basically. And so it's a completely counterproductive activity. The only thing you gain by going to prison for nonviolent drug offenders is crappy tattoos. Yeah, out of time, thanks for coming.